Memoirs - This Genre is new to me

My first taste of this Genre was The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls and I really enjoyed it, I read it just before I started blogging but can still remember it.  I decided to try more, do you have any recommendations?

I am Currently Reading The Adderall Diaries: A Memoir of Moods, Masochism, and Murder

On Amazon From Publishers Weekly


As a writer stymied by past success, writers block, substance abuse, relationship problems and a serious set of father issues, Elliott's cracked-out chronicle of a bizarre murder trial amounts to less than the sum of its parts. Not long into the 2007 trial of programmer Hans Reiser, accused of murdering his wife, the defendant's friend Sean Sturgeon obliquely confessed to several murders (though not the murder of Reiser's wife). Elliott, caught up in the film-ready twist and his tenuous connection to Sturgeon (they share a BDSM social circle), makes a gonzo record of the proceedings. The result is a scattered, self-indulgent romp through the mind of a depressive narcissist obsessed with his insecurities and childhood traumas. Elliott is an undeniably good writer, but his voice has more to do with amphetamines than the author himself or the trial at hand. Elliott's frustration with himself is contagious; any readers expecting a true crime will be bewildered, and those familiar with Elliott (My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up) will find more (or less) of the same.



This Year I read My Review of The Prisoner's Wife

From Booklist


When one hears of a woman marrying a man in prison, especially a man she met while he was already in prison, it is hard not to question her motives or sanity. Poet asha bandele writes of her relationship with Rashid, a man serving 20-to-life for murder. She tells of how she met this man while she was visiting the prison to read her poetry; of how she visited him as a friend/lover, waiting five years before she married him; of waiting the long months after the marriage before they were granted a conjugal visit; of love letters, long collect phone calls, and the horror and indignity of their prison situation. Yet she found in Rashid the strength to remember and confront her past as a victim of sexual abuse. She found, too, the love that most women long for, but in a place that imposes limitations that are a nightmare. Her writing soars with emotion. And the reader's emotions soar as well, not because of a shared experience but because her highly polished and skillful writing makes one feel her pain and joy. This is a romantic but realistic story, told with a directness and honesty that make us know that however impossible the problems asha and Rashid face, we can question neither her motives nor her sanity.

I have added these two from recommendations.

Motherless Child - stories from a life

Imagine you gave a baby up for adoption forty years ago, and after years of trying to find her, she finds you. Now come the hard questions. She's healthy, beautiful, and successful, but she wants to know why you gave her away and why you didn't marry her father. And there is also the unspoken question of "What kind of black woman gives her baby away?" How do you explain to her that giving her away was the best gift you could offer? This is Sarah Weathersby's first published work, a coming-of-age-in-the-sixties-single-black-pregnant and on the way to Germany, memoir.




A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
 

In A LONG WAY GONE: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Beah, now twenty-six years old, tells a powerfully gripping story: At the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. At sixteen, he was removed from fighting by UNICEF, and through the help of the staff at his rehabilitation center, he learned how to forgive himself, to regain his humanity, and, finally, to heal.


This is an extraordinary and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.





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